The secular trinity of 19th century socialism was Labour-Internationalism-Socialist Revolution as emancipation was then called. However, as early-industrial capitalism developed into a national-industrial-colonial capitalism. the internationalism of labour became a relationship between nationally-defined unions, nation states, nationalisms and nationalists. It simultaneously lost its emancipatory aspiration and capacity. Internationalism, it now appears, is not simply a higher-level relationship between workers in distant places, it is, or must be, a value internal to the labour movement, without which labour and unions are imprisoned within the capitalist state-nation.

New Globalised Capitalism, New Working Classes, New Labour Internationalism

Now, the dramatic development of a globalised-networked-informatised capitalism (GNC) is raising the necessity and possibility of a new kind of labour internationalism, capable not only of defence against neo-liberal globalisation but also of an emancipatory challenge to capitalism as such. Such an emancipation can be assisted by a recognition of the work and workers produced by a GNC. This work is increasingly outside industry, it can be home-based, distributed worldwide, fractured, temporary, part-time, individualised.

Workers are increasingly becoming what is called ‘atypical’. Decreasingly are they industrial, male, lifetime, nine-to-five, or unionised. The extreme case reveals the more general tendency. In India, with a labour force of some 390 million, labour is four per cent unionised and 93 per cent ‘atypical’! The three or four per cent are divided up into a myriad of mostly enterprise or local unions and national confederations, including the mutually competing, but shrinking, ones of socialism and communism.

Politically, today, the emancipation of labour internationalism requires an intimate articulation of labour with the ‘anti-globalisation’, ‘anti-corporate’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, and serious address to processes, discontents, social actors, movements and alternatives, previously considered marginal or irrelevant. Actually, it requires all these things for minimal defence, never mind effective assertion.

Challenge of the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement

The ‘Anti-Corporate’, ‘Anti-Capitalist’, ‘Anti-Globalisation’ movement, the ‘Movement of Movements’ is, as these various names might suggest, a new and problematic political or theoretical object. Liberal pundits and traditional socialists worry about the movement’s lack of traditional labour or nationalist movement characteristics: an organisation; a leadership; a programme; an ideology; a leader.

Whilst each of the earlier terms above captures an aspect of this amorphous being/becoming, the ‘Global Justice and Solidarity Movement’ - the name given it by the World Social Movement Network (WSMN) within the Second World Social Forum, early 2002 - seems to me as good a characterisation (of its present stage of development) as any. Old once-emancipatory ideologies, with effect on the inter/national labour movement, such as Liberal-Democracy, Populism, Socialism (Reformist or Revolutionary), are losing the popular appeal they previously had. ‘Global Justice and Solidarity’ could appeal to both old activists and to the new and young ones just becoming aware and motivated.

‘The Battle of Seattle’ and the World Social Forums are perhaps the best-known emanations of the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement. But the movements provoked by neo-liberalism and globalisation began with the ‘Food Riots’ or ‘IMF Riots’ in the Third World of the 1980s.

This has become the first major radical-democratic movement of the epoch of a GNC (for the major radical, international but undemocratic ones, consider the various religious and national-communal fundamentalisms). It is a radical-democratic movement, in the sense that it represents a response to, against and beyond the hegemonic globalisation project known as neo-liberalism. It is radically-democratic in so far as it seeks out the roots of that project and suggests, increasingly, alternatives to such. It is radically-democratic also because its seeks for democracy-without-limits, as an alternative to the low-intensity-democracy and neo-liberalism, being presently promoted, alongside war-without-end, by the imperial and global hegemons.

The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement is also potentially holistic, in so far as it addresses, centrally, political-economic issues, linking these with the needs of repressed or under-represented identities and minorities (these sometimes being such majorities as Women and the South). This is, finally, a movement of the present epoch because it is networked/communicational/cultural, thus inhabiting and disputing not only the national industrial (anti)colonial capitalism (NICC) of the continuing past but the globalised networked capitalism (GNC) of the unfolding future.

International Labour and World Social Forum

The World Social Forum 2003 at Porto Alegre, Brazil, saw a growth and deepening of the relationship between international labour organisations and the Forum. There are already about a dozen inter/national unions on the International Council. There is no evidence that they have tried to act within the IC as an interest or a bloc. With one or two exceptions, they may have been primarily concerned with finding out what kind of exotic animal – or zoo - this is.

The increasing interest of this major traditional movement institution in the Forum was demonstrated by the presence, for the first time, of the General Secretary of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). But top officers of Global Union Federations (GUFs, formerly International Trade Secretariats) were also present, either prominently on platforms or quietly testing the water. Present, further, were inter/national union organisations/networks from far beyond the ICFTU family (now formalised as Global Unions).

A major panel, on the union/social-movement relationship, saw the platform shared between the Global Unions, independent left unions and articulate leaders of social movements or NGOs heavily identified with the Forum process. The unions, moreover, seemed increasingly prepared to recognize that they are institutions and that it is they that need to come to terms with a place and process that, whilst lacking in formal representativity and often inchoate, nevertheless has the appeal, dynamism, public reach and mobilising capacity, that they themselves both seriously lack and urgently need. (The formal representativity of international labour organisations conceals the ignorance or passivity of most union members globally. The ICFTU knows it has 157 million members. But how many of these members know that the ICFTU has them?)

When an old institution meets a new movement, something has got to give. Thus has the trade-union movement been periodically transformed during two centuries of existence. But who, which or what is going to so give during the current transformation of capitalism? Bearing in mind that decision-makers of both international labour organisations and the WSF could have quite opportunist reasons for relating to each other, one cannot be certain that the openness within the Forums guarantees that the principles at stake will be continually and publicly raised.

Given the growing presence of the traditional international union institutions within the World Social Forum, given, further, their growing presence within the wider global justice and solidarity movement, it is becoming increasingly difficult to set up the TIUI-Global Justice and Solidarity Movement relationship in binary-oppositional terms. The old unions are both inside and outside the new movement. Furthermore the new movement is increasingly inside as well as outside the old international union institutions!

The articulation of the trade unions with the World Social Forum opens up the possibility of a new kind of international social movement unionism. This would be good for the unions, which desperately need to ‘put the movement back into the labour movement’, and good for the WSF and the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement, which could benefit greatly from an articulation with the 150-200 million unionised workers.